Dreaming of France -- Falling in Love With France

Thank you for joining this weekly meme. Grab a copy of the photo above and link back to An Accidental Blog. Share with the rest of us your passion for France. Did you read a good book set in France? See a movie? Take a photo in France? Have an adventure? Eat a fabulous meal or even just a pastry? Or if you're in France now, go ahead and lord it over the rest of us. We can take it.

I've written some guest posts for the FranceBookTour of my novel Paris Runaway. I thought I'd share one of the posts that I wrote for bookwormerz which ran on Sunday. It tells the story of how, after a
rocky start, I fell in love with France.

Falling in Love With France

I visited France for the first time at age 20. My college boyfriend and I went on one of those 21-day tours where we visited 14 countries, or maybe it was a 14-day trip with 21 countries. Either way, one of those countries was France.

I’d gotten sick in Rome, with Montezuma’s Revenge, and it lasted into Paris. I remember visiting Notre Dame and desperately searching for a bathroom nearby. What I found was a Turkish toilet.

Those are hard to find in France these days, but a Turkish toilet was a stall with a place for your feet to go on either side of a drain in the floor. I still can’t work out the mechanics for a woman that doesn’t result in damp underwear. That experience could have ruined my love for France, but it didn’t.

A year after college graduation I was working at a newspaper and dating a photographer, whose sister was married to a Frenchman. The sister, who was pregnant, her husband, and their two little girls had tickets to go to France for the summer, when the sister was ordered to bedr est. Someone needed to step up and travel with the girls. I volunteered.  

Here are the two girls and their grandfather, along with a couple of cousins, on the balcony in Corsica. 

I told my boss I was going and that I didn’t care whether I’d have a job when I returned. Picture me as a bossy, impetuous 22 –year-old. (Luckily, they found a summer intern and my job waited for me.)

So with two little girls and a Frenchman I didn’t know, we flew to Paris. The first few days could have ruined my love affair with France as I took the girls on a bus to their great-grandmother’s apartment in the Latin Quarter of Paris. But the bus went the opposite direction that we needed and we ended up on an impromptu, hot, diesel-fueled tour of Paris, getting off at several stops in hopes of finding our way.  Another day I got separated from the girls when they stepped through a Metro stall with sliding doors, and the doors closed before I could follow them. A flight attendant behind me had an extra ticket and used it to reunite me with the girls.

But every negative experience melted away as I traveled with the girls and their grandparents over the next three months. We flew to Corsica and spent our days splashing in the Mediterranean and enjoying each meal as a symphony of tastes and textures. 

Me, on the beach. There are probably naked, or at least topless, people right behind me. 

Our evenings filled with concerts and tennis matches and nights on the veranda watching the star-spangled sky for the slowly moving space station.

When we returned to mainland France, we stayed one night in Aix en Provence. I can still remember the thrill of coming home that rippled through me when I stepped onto Cours Mirabeau, the wide boulevard lined with plane trees.

For a month, we stayed in the family’s country home near Bourges. The house came into the family during Napoleon’s reign, and it had served as a base for the Germans when they invaded during World War II, then the Americans when they drove back the Germans. The numerous sets of French doors opened onto a yard, which led to fields of sheep and flocks of chickens. We walked to the village for bread each day, stopping to feed a pony.

Here I am, prepared for dinner, as I sit on the terrace writing. I wish you could see my
adorable ankle socks and aqua shoes that matched my top, but this print is not the best quality.

Finally, we returned to Paris and the grandparents’ apartment in the suburbs. The grandmother urged me to explore the city while she watched the girls, and, oh, what adventures I had as I wandered alone.

I’ve included memories from this trip in all of my novels set in France – The Summer of France, I See London I See France, and Paris Runaway.

In each of my French novels, I try to recapture the magical experiences of that first immersion into France – the trip that taught me the importance of savoring each bite of luscious nectarine, rather than worrying about the juice that ran down my arm.

Thanks so much for playing along with Dreaming of France today. Please leave your name and blog address in Mr. Linky below, and leave a comment letting me know what  you think about my love affair with France, or your own love affair. And consider visiting the blogs of others who play along so we can all share the love. 

I'm also linking to Paris in July. Hope you'll play along with both Dreaming of France and Paris in July. We can't have too much France love, right?

The Making of a Memoir

I'm writing a new book. I just started a few weeks ago and I have 63 pages already.
Maybe I'm moving quickly because I already know the ending.
This time, instead of a novel, I'm writing a memoir.
During the Paris in July meme sponsored by Thyme for Tea and Bookbath, I realized that most of the French books that we readers recommended were memoirs. So, with my brain trust of running friends, we decided that I should write a memoir. Then we took it a step further, notched it up, and decided I should write about my time spent as a nanny. That's a combination of two tell-all books that people are sure to love.
So rather than a story about Americans who move to France and try desperately to fit into the local culture, I'll be writing about an American girl (me) thrust into the midst of a French family -- the awkwardness and the insights. So far, I'm titling it An American Nanny in France. An American Nanny in Paris sounds a little better, but we were only in Paris for a month, spending the other months in Corsica and at a family house near Bourges.

This looks like the perfect writing spot for me
with my notebook, my wine and the pool
shimmering before me.

I'll be changing the names of the French family members so that I can be very honest about everything that happened. I have written about some of these adventures on my blog before, so I guess I'll need to go back and change the names there too.
Anyway, I wanted to share with you my exciting news and tell you a story about how the memoir led to my mom and me laughing so hard that we cried.
I haven't written a memoir before, so I was kind of puzzled about recreating conversations and other important events. I have photos. I have a journal, which includes some conversations, but I also wrote in-depth letters to my mom and my brother Kevin while I was in France. I need those letters.
I saw Kevin last week and he said he didn't have the letters. He suggested I try Mom and Dad's house.
Of course, Mom and Dad have moved about five times since my trip 25 years ago.
I alerted Mom that I was searching for the letters and said we'd look when I arrived this weekend. she had already emptied out her mother's trunk (new in 1915) looking for the letters with no luck. She pulled out another bin that was filled with greeting cards and letters and memorabilia. We went through all the musty letters. We handed over golf score cards from years ago to my dad. We threw away the envelopes all those cards had come in.
Then my mom picked up a hand-made card from my little brother. "Happy Mother's Day, Mom," it said. "From Kevin Kincer" and that started us laughing that he felt the need to sign his last name to his mother.
Then my dad found, tucked in a birthday card to him from his mother some letters from me and my sister. They were letters we'd written to my grandmother and she apparently sent them back to him when she wasn't getting along with our family. Mom and I were laughing at that too -- how ludicrous.
Then Mom read aloud the letter my 9-year-old self had written. The basic gist of the letter was whether my grandmother had gotten my previous letters and why she hadn't written back when I was still waiting for a reply. I was quite insistent and pushy, even at 9 years old. As Mom read the letter, the tears were running out of her eyes and down our cheeks.
Sometimes you just have to be there to understand why the joke is funny. But we definitely enjoyed our time going through the old box of cards and letters.
The bad news is we didn't find the letters from France. The good news is that we have more boxes upstairs and can look forward to another day of going through old memorabilia. Maybe they'll make us laugh again.


Wildfires in Corsica

The news for weeks has talked about wildfires in Colorado. People flee their homes with few belongings and wait anxiously to see if the firefighters can stop the walls of flames advancing through the dry mountain brush. Houses are burned. Some people have died.
The news reminds me of a month I spent in Corsica more than 25 years ago. I was there babysitting two American girls with French grandparents and it seems like the time is right to tell the story since I'm participating in Paris in July sponsored byThyme for Tea and Bookbath . I've posted about my trip here when I talked about fashion, and here about lessons I learned from France, and here about a secret crush and an injury in Corsica.
While we were staying in Corsica, wildfires burned.
At first, I didn't know what was happening. I stretched out on my bed in the stone house to take a siesta while the little girls, Claire, 3, and Brigid, 4, napped. As I lay there, I heard the drone of an airplane. At home, I would have thought nothing of it. On the northwest coast of Corsica, the sound was as foreign as the language remained.
A knock drew my attention and Yves stuck his head in the door. "Come look at zhe planes," he beckoned.
I followed him to the stone balcony that faced the bowl of a bay in the Mediterannean. The bright yellow planes, the color of the winner's jersey on the Tour de France, took turns swooping into the Mediterranean Sea below us. Like pelicans going in for a catch, the planes skimmed the water, filling their red, hollow bellies with water. The planes then buzzed away to drop their loads of water on the fires in the mountains beyond.
We walked up the road to the top of the mountain, searching for smoke or a glimpse of the fire. We couldn't spot either, so we returned to our normal life, eating extravagant meals, lying on the beach,  playing tennis.
Corsica is a very dry island, with part of the land being a desert. In the sparsely-populated island, fires started and spread quickly without the benefits of fire hydrants or firefighters close by. Even if the island was lush with firefighters, it might take hours for fire trucks, on barely passable roads that twist through the mountains with sharp drop offs on one side and walls of rock on the other, to reach the spot where the fire burned .
A week later, on a Saturday night, we were driving to a nearby village. We looked up to see bright orange lights in some far away mountains. The next morning, the bells of the church rang loudly in the background while we stood watching smoke billow from a mountain across the water. Most of the day the mountain seemed to burn. We pulled out the binoculars to search for flames, but the dense smoke blocked the view of the flames.
On Monday morning, the faint acrid smell of smoke hung in the air. By afternoon, small pieces of ash fell into the gardens and on the house, as if we lived near a recently erupted volcano.
We ventured down to the beach, but the expanse along the water began to feel closed in as the smoke rose in huge clouds blocking out the sun. We heard the now familiar whir of the planes buzzing above the Mediterranean, like so many dragonflies searching for a clear place to swoop down to the water.
Children and adults rushed down to the edge of the water to watch the planes at work. The planes, tipped at a careful angle to gather water then take off again, slowly pulled away from the sea, full of their lifesaving load.
That afternoon, the windows in the house grew dark as the smoke billowed across the sky blocking out the light. I took the girls to the lower level and began to read them stories to distract them from the fire.
"Are we safe here?" I wanted to ask. The house was made of stone but had lots of wood, plus the roof could catch fire.
"Should we evacuate?" I wondered.
But I was still young enough to believe that wildfires weren't really dangerous and I trusted the judgment of the real adults in the house as I huddled in the lower level. I heard the swoosh of water from a hose as Monsieur Berger watered down the roof of the house to thwart any sparks. His children called to him to come inside, this elderly Frenchman who fought in World War II and was captured by the Germans. He refused to turn off the hose, to retreat into his Corsican vacation home and huddle with his family away from the flames.
The house didn't burn.

This was the door to our lower level.
One day, we found a snake coiled in the stones there.

The next morning we took a trip across the island. We saw the blackened mountains and the skeletons of small shrubs brown and brittle. In places, stood geometric shapes of green, miraculously hopped over by the fire.  On our drive back home, the smell of smoke alerted us to another fire. A thick cloud of smoke surrounded the car and the orange flames came into view, having already engulfed some small trees, leaving branches blackened. The popping and crackling of the burning plants reached our ears as we drove the car away from the flickering flames.
A lone fire truck wound slowly around the mountain, its blue light flashing solemnly, as we rounded a cliff and came face to face with a quarter moon whose white face reflected the flames turning it orange in the sky.

.

Injury Stories

So we found out last night that Tucker's swim relay teams will be moving on to State competition, which is awesome, and was also just a few hours after he stubbed his toe on the bathroom door and it swelled up.
Offering the proper amount of sympathy for an injury is one of those mothering things I struggle with, as Grace would be happy to tell you. So when Tucker showed me his swollen little toe, it made me reminisce about the time I broke my little toe.
Of course, I didn't stub it on a bathroom door. That would be so bourgeois.
It was the summer I spent a month in Corsica...
I won't bore you with the details of the handsome doctor Francois, the younger brother of the family I stayed with, but one day Francois, his brother-in-law Yves and I took the family sailboat to a beach that could only be reached by boat. It was a special beach, they explained, but neglected to mention that it was a nude beach. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised -- they were French.
So we sailed for about an hour across the Mediterranean on their little white sailboat. The color of the Mediterranean, was startlingly blue. As we sailed beneath the beaming sun, small fish with gills like wings skimmed above the water for long stretches -- flying fish.
When we got to the special, isolated beach, we pulled the boat onto the sand. Francois and Yves immediately shed their bathing suits while I spread a towel away from them, afraid to even look their way. (I was so American.) It was on that beach that I learned most Frenchmen are not circumcised.
On the way home that evening, sizzling from a day at the beach, Francois suggested I try the trapeze on the sailboat. The trapeze is a wire that attaches to the top of the mast then comes down to a harness that can go around a person's waist. I stepped into the trapeze and moved to the side of the sailboat to act as ballast. (I'm not sure if this was a comment on my American lack of thinness.)
I was timid at first, afraid to lean out over the gleaming water. But Francois and Yves both urged me to trust the wire and lean back with my feet planted on the edge of the sailboat. So I did.

I arched my back and felt the spray of the water cooling me as the wind directed the sails and we glided across the Mediterranean. Then the wind changed or Francois wasn't paying attention and suddenly the boat lurched and I went swinging toward the mast, where I hit my foot and broke my little toe.
Francois was a doctor and he assured me that, although the toe was broken, we couldn't really do anything but wait for it to heal. Luckily, I had a few more weeks to spend barefoot on the beach in Corsica.
How about you? Do you have interesting stories about an injury?

Material Girl

Today, I meant to write the story of an Argentine sailor and an Ohio girl who met at the Louvre in Paris. But, I didn't feel that I could tell you that story unless I could find a picture of myself from that trip to France so you could imagine the whole scene.
I found some pictures but they led me in a totally different direction. They reminded me why I fell in love with France. This first picture should sum it up for you.

This was the view from the balcony of the house where I stayed in Corsica. But before I got to Corsica, I was a 22-year-old working at The Middletown Journal, covering exciting things like school boards and city council. I was dating a photographer named Greg and his sister was married to a Frenchman.
Duh, duh, duh, duh.
That's the set up. They lived near Yale or Harvard or someplace, and they had two little girls, Brigid and Claire. The mother was pregnant with her third child when she started to have difficulties with her pregnancy. The family already had tickets to travel to France in early July. What could they do? They asked me to go along with the girls and the father to Paris. Then the father would return home and I would stay in France with the girls at their grandparents' home until their baby brother was born.
I didn't hesitate. I told my boss I was going whether I had a job when I returned home or not. He talked to me about health insurance and I vaguely hummed "La Vie en Rose" as his words whizzed past. Who cared about jobs and health insurance? I was going to France with an open-ended ticket.
The grandparents had an apartment at the Viroflay RER stop, headed from Paris out toward Versailles. But they weren't there when we arrived. They had gone to their vacation home in Corsica.
Before I get too carried away telling the story of a young Ohioan in Paris with two French-American toddlers, I'd better return to the point of this story. My clothes. This was the mid-1980s and I dressed in skirts, dresses, ankle socks and low heeled shoes.
Look. Here's an example.

See those cute little socks that may be red or pink. Hard to tell but they match my top and the plaid in my skirt.
Okay, the girls are cute too. That's Brigid, 4, on the left and Claire, 3, all the way to the right. On my lap was Isabelle and next to me Agnes. They are the children of the French/Polish couple we visited in April. Now back to the 22-year-old me.
I couldn't find a photo of myself in my favorite dress. It was flowered pinks, blues and purples, and had a wide, round, white collar. That's what I was wearing the day I met the Argentine sailor in the Louvre. I also wore a pair of pink ankle socks that had lace around them. The sailor said, in his smidgen of English, that I couldn't possibly be American because I wasn't wearing tennis shoes and chewing gum.
But, I'm getting pulled into the Argentine sailor story, when I meant to talk about why I loved France and how I dressed like Madonna.
Here's another photo on the balcony where we ate dinner every night in Corsica. I look a little fuzzy in this picture, but you can see my white fishnet ankle socks. You can't see my shoes, which are the same color blue as my top.

If they'd had the phrase then, I would have thought I was "all that."
My suitcase was so full of outfits that I probably didn't even get around to wearing them all in the three months that I was there.
Who was that girl, I wonder. That very confident, very flamboyant girl who would only wear shoes that matched the outfit. Now, I shuffle through the snow in my Crocs.
When I first arrived in France, although I had minored in French in college, I couldn't understand very much of what was said. The French family spoke freely in front of me -- about me.
I remember one night at dinner, one of the guests said that it was obvious I loved French food.
They thought I was chunky.
"Oh, no. She came that way," the family assured the guest, letting the guest know that I hadn't been fattened on French food but American food.
I don't remember being insulted, just shrugging it off.
I felt satisfied with myself. Maybe that's why the country spoke to me so much, because I liked who I was at that very moment.
When I visit France now, I think I'm much more aware of trying to do "the proper thing." On that trip though, I was the authentic me -- a Material Girl.

Lessons from France

Twenty-five years ago today, I was in France. That was my longest trip to France where I spent three months shepherding two young American girls as their grandparents spent a month each in Corsica, the French countryside near Bourges and then their apartment in Paris.
Aaaah!
Although the trip was long and I began to miss home, the trip definitely changed my life. One of the things I learned was that education was a priority for the French, and although I had my bachelor's degree, I came home determined to further my education. I entered graduate school the following year and received my master's degree. Maybe my need for more education came because of the cute doctor, Francois, who trying to explain sailing to me asked in a puzzled voice, "Didn't you ever take physeeks?" Of course, he meant physics, and I still haven't taken it.
Maybe the love for education came from lying on the beach in Corsica while reading F. Scott Fitzgerald. Aaah! There is no better place to read Fitzgerald than on a French beach. Maybe the need for education seeped in during the heated political discussions with the German cousins. Maybe it came from being surrounded by a strange language, although I had minored in French in college, that finally began to be understandable. I loved being able to decipher the words so that slowly the family had to stop talking about me when I was in the room.
And that master's degree has really paid off for me, finally. I'm not just a stay-at-home mom writing occasional articles for the newspaper. I'm teaching at two different colleges and making enough money to send my daughter to college.
But, in spite of all these ways that visit to France changed my life, that isn't why I started thinking about my trip 25 years ago.
It was the simple peach that brought it back to me.

When I was a kid, I was fairly persnickety. I remember sitting at the dining room table all afternoon because I refused to eat the apricots my mom served. She made me stay at the table until I ate them. She finally gave up.
So when I went to France, at the beginning I was turning down offers of cantaloupe and watermelon. The French would look at me in astonishment. How could someone not like these fruits?
When they offered me a nectarine, I took it curiously. I had never eaten a nectarine. They asked me what the word was in English and peach was as close as I could get, but that wasn't right.
That nectarine in Corsica was heavenly. The juice would have dripped down my arm if I'd eaten it like an American, which I didn't, since I was in France. We used a knife and fork to slice up the nectarine and delicately eat each juicy morsel. It was the best fruit I had ever tasted.
This year, the peaches I've been buying from Trader Joe's are rivaling those nectarines. The scent rises from the box tempting me as I pass. And I do pick up a peach with its red and gold soft skin and bite into it, allowing the juice to drip down my arm. And it makes me think of Corsica and France and cute French doctors who say "physeeks."